Let us dance
by Shamelessly Radiant
Summary: [Death/Elisabeth] Five years after Mayerling, Elisabeth has a riding accident. (Elisabeth and Death meet one last time before the fateful 10 september in Geneva)


**A/N:** In the musical, Death is conspicably absent after rejecting Sisi. Plotting in the background, while Elisabeth travels and travels, lost. But what if they meet one more time in between the two events?  
Heavily inspired by Der Untergang by BluWacky on AO3

.

"Elisabeth," she hears his whisper, but when she looks over her shoulder no one is there. Confused, she again looks round the clearing, trying to remember how she came to be here… There was… a horse, and wind in her hair, and… she fell?

Yes. That's right. She had wanted so badly to escape her maddening, suffocating entourage, their pleas for her to eat, their remarks about her weight and behavior, that she had first spurred her mare into a canter and then into a mad gallop, faster and faster and faster until she could no longer hear the shouts that warned of caution, until she had finally been alone.

And then the mare had jumped over a tree, but something had startled her and she had stood up on her hind legs wildly, suddenly and there had been no way to go but down, and Elisabeth had crashed to the forest ground.

Now, everything is unnaturally still around her, devoid of all noise and movement of the living. The world only becomes like this when he is near. The peace of it lulls her to something akin sleep, the sun shining warmly on her face, the sky blue.

"Elisabeth."

There he is. Not once has she seen him since she tried to throw herself at him after Rudolf and Mayerling, and he rejected her so cruelly. Even now, she cannot read his face, his hands held behind his back, this careful distance between the two of them.

 _It is true, then_ she thinks, as a sadness she can't quite understand suddenly washes over her. _He does not want me, anymore. I had my chance and I lost it._ She wonders if this has to do with the creases of her face, with the way her hair is starting to be streaked with grey, with her lost beauty.

A flicker of something passes over his face, gone too quickly to read it, but she notices his eyes are not that blank as she first believed them to be.

"Why are you here?" she asks him tiredly, willing this to be over. It hurts too much to see him so aloof.

"Because you wish it to be so."

"No," she shakes her head, "I was simply trying to—"

"Escape. Yes, yes. As always. The ever unobtainable _freedom_ you have yet to stop chasing. When will you stop these lies and disillusions you spin around your life? When will you see beyond the pretty, empty fairytale?"

His words hurt like a physical blow. Tears spring into her eyes, but she refuses to let them fall. Still, she cannot help the way her breath hisses between her teeth on her intake of air, or the way she clutches her chest in sudden pain, in sudden cold.

She nods, slowly, resigned. Tries to smile, tries to bring back the defiance into their little game, tries to act the way she always acted.

"I do not want you." She says, but her words ring hollow.

"You do, or else I would not be here. Empress." His words are like ice, and when he drops them from his mouth they shatter, the shards burying themselves into her heart.

She tries to stand, but stumbles, and as she reaches for something to steady herself, he is suddenly there, holding her up. One wild instant, she recoils from his touch, but as his hands loosen in their grip, hers fasten, grasping at his arm and coat with all the force she can muster, sinking into his chest, sending the both of them back to the ground when she stops every effort to hold herself up, and holds him instead.

"Have you come to take me?" she asks him, no longer sure what she wishes his answer to be.

"No. Your Death will not be as insignificant as this, Elisabeth. A fall from a horse? Please. I will not allow you to go down as a footnote in history."

"I thought it was my choice." She snaps, angry, "and yet you refused me!"

"How did it make you feel?" he asks, his hand tightening in her hair, pulling her head back to make her look at him, even as she gasps from the pain. In his voice is barely contained fury, so much it trembles from it, and in his eyes burns the rage of a hunter, the determination of an assassin, the knowledge and power of a being greater than life. " _How_ did it make you feel? Answer me!"

"Angry!" she snaps, "Desolate, abandoned, alone. I needed you and you were not there."

"You cursed me. Only wanted to use me to escape your pain."

"You took Rudolf from me! First my eldest daughter, then my only son and barely a year later Néné! And you were not there, never there anymore!"

"I am Death," he roars. The clearing no longer peaceful. The tree leaves and branches shake menacing in the sudden wind, the blue sky makes place for turbulent grey clouds streaked with lightning, his voice sounds as thunder as he seems to grow and grow, becoming shadow and light, becoming something so great she can barely wrap her mind around it, something to fear, something to behold and pray to and adore. She shrinks back, but he is everywhere around her, she becomes swept up, surrounded: "I cannot be summoned at will! I take what is mine and I bow to no human. No one defies me!"

Then, he seems to deflate. His grip no longer painful as he clutches her to his chest. The sky returning to blue, the wind fading." Except you," he whispers, "you made me beg you to come with me, and twice you refused me."

"So the third time it was your turn," she whispers, comforted by this knowledge, and feeling strangely guilty. The terms of the game have changed, of lately. She is not quite sure it is still a game at all.

She lets her head fall back, rest on his arm, opens her mouth slightly as he leans forward, as he comes close, so close. She twines her hand in the blonde strands of the back of his head, and sighs. He cups her face, his thumb stroking her cheekbone, on his face the gentle little smile he had only shown her one other time, the time he had told her he loved her.

She can almost feel his lips on hers, when he pulls back, conflict and desire waging war in his eyes. "No. It is not your time, yet."

Elisabeth grips him in sudden fear of abandonment, wanting him to hold her, to stay with her. Her life has become so empty lately. She does not know how to feel alive anymore.

"But soon?" she asks him. _But will it be you that comes for me? Do you love me still?_

He does not reply, merely passes his hand over her eyes and everything becomes black.

She wakes up to her entourage, to doctors, to being carried back to her temporary home, her current place of residence, which may change tomorrow or whenever she desires it. She remembers his words from a life time ago, when he visited her after Franz and she had become King and Queen of Hungary. She remembers she longed for him to touch her, just now, the way she longed to stay with him, the desperation she felt when he would not come near, and the peace she felt in his arms, the pain and burn of his rejection fading.

 _There will come a time when you will long for me to love you and set you free_.

He was right. The bastard. She loved him, she desired him. And now he had left her again, but he had uttered something about significance and history. In his eyes she had seen, for one wild moment, a sinking ship, a flash of metal, a speck of red on white. He had not answered her last questions, but she could swear his chin had gone down in something like a nod.

Her head threatens to burst with it, so she closes her eyes and succumbs to darkness once more, fervently longing for it to last.

 **A/N:** Rudolf died 30 january 1889, after shooting himself and his mistress at Mayerling  
Helene (Néné) died 16 may 1890  
Almost a decade later (10 september 1898), Elisabeth was stabbed on her way to board a boat in Geneva. Because she laced her corsets so tight, they didn't know she had been fatally wounded, as only a small speck of blood showed, the bleeding internal: her heart had been pierced.  
The sentence: 'There will come a time when you will long for me to love you and set you free' is a lyric out of the earlier version of Wenn ich tanzen will, called 'Wenn ich tanz' and I honestly don't know which of the two I prefer.


End file.
